Five top administration Lawyers wrote the Bush/Cheney rules on torture

Alberto Gonzales - former White House Council.
David Addington - legal adviser and now chief of staff to Cheney.
William J. Haynes II - former Pentagon general counsel.
John Yoo - former Justice Department Lawyer.
Timothy E. Flanigan - former deputy to Alberto Gonzales.

What do these men have in common? From the McClatchy news article:

WASHINGTON — The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials. [Snip]

The quintet of lawyers, who called themselves the “War Council," drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military's code of justice, the federal court system and America's international treaties in order to prevent anyone — from soldiers on the ground to the president — from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes.

These five men, following orders and guidance from George Bush and Dick Cheney, allowed and encouraged individuals from being held accountable for what otherwise would be considered war crimes. It seems only right and fair that they, themselves, should be held directly and criminally accountable for those crimes.

An authoritarian welcome to Bush's America

This is Bush's authoritarian America. Our government, under the Republicans, has gone mad.

Read this story: A young blonde Icelandic woman's recent experience visiting the US.

Who gained by humiliating this woman except some jackbooted Republican thugs who got to show that they were in command?

Iran stops trading oil in dollars

From Bloomberg:

By Robin Stringer

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Iran, the second-biggest producer of crude oil in the Middle East, has ``completely halted'' all oil transactions in dollars, the state-run ISNA news agency said, citing Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari.

Nozari said the U.S. currency was no longer reliable as the dollar continues to depreciate. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has set up a team to study pricing oil in another currency, the INSA cited Nozari as saying.

This is going to put further downward pressure on the value of the dollar against other currencies.

This will put pressure on the other OPEC nations to similarly stop trading for oil in dollars. If they choose to switch to the Euro then there will be a lot less international demand for dollars, and since there is already a severe oversupply of dollars, the effect will be to cause a sudden sharp drop in the value of the dollar, accompanied by an increase in the price of oil.

While the previous fall in the value of the dollar and the further expect drop is one reason for Iran to stop trading in it, the action very likely has political motivations. The fact that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has threatened the same action, switching from the dollar to either the Euro or a basket of currencies is a strong indication that those nations America is attempting to strongarm find this a good way to get back at America.

The U.S. has two ways to influence Iran. One is economic sanctions and the other is to apply military power. America's military power has been seriously weakened as our ground troops are being chewed up in Iraq and Afghanistan. The recent release of the NIE on the Iranian nuclear weapons program will make it a lot harder for Cheney or Bush to instigate military action against Iran. So the Iranians need to degrade America's economic strength.

If Iran's action can trigger the switch of international oil pricing from the dollar, it will cause both the greater further drop of the dollar and it will make inflation in the U.S. a much more serious threat to the American economy. If the petrodollar is lost, America will go into serious stagflation. In addition, the further sharp increase in the price of oil will make it a lot harder for America to maintain two aircraft carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and one in the Mediterranean (which requires six carrier groups.) In addition, the price of flying sorties will increase, as will the cost of aviation training. That training and the resulting superiority of American air crews has more to do with America's general superiority over other air forces than does the quality of the American aircraft, but the superiority will disappear very quickly as flight time is reduced.

The major argument against OPEC nations switching away from pricing oil in the dollar is that most of them have major dollar-denominated investments that will also sharply lose value as the dollar drops. China, Japan and South Korea will have similar problems, but they are all net oil consuming nations.

So at a guess, I'd say that Iran and Venezuela, along with Russia, will pressure for a shift to pricing oil in either the Euro or a basket of currencies. But they all have relatively low dollar-denominated investments. Saudi Arabia will fight to keep oil priced in dollars, as will the Persian Gulf oil producing states. The rest of OPEC will be strung out in between.

The result is that the American economy is under severe threat at the moment, and America is going to find itself dependent on the charity of strangers with no effective actions that can be taken to actually control the situation. The outcome is very uncertain.

One thing that is very, very clear, though, is that Bush and Cheney's military bombast will be the very worst way to try to influence the nations in the rest of the world.

Republicans represent torture, lawlessness, secrecy , lies

The New York Times presented a lengthy article on the way the Bush administration and the Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzalez implemented the harshest "interrogation" techniques possible. Then, when Congress tried to stop them, the administration secretly declared that the torture techniques did not violate the law passed by Congress.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

The excuse for the secrecy was so that that America's enemies couldn't train to beat the torture techniques, but the real reason was so that the American public would not know how utterly depraved the Bush administration and the Republican Party had become.

This was no accident or action by an out-of-control underling. The secret declaration that the torture techniques would be used in spite of the law passed by Congress was one of Bush's signing statements.

It's not as though there wasn't a problem in determining what should or could be done to interrogate prisoners. Here is what the CIA was doing:

slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

“We were getting asked about combinations — ‘Can we do this and this at the same time?’” recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: “These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature — can they be combined?” Or “Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme?”

There was a problem that needed to be resolved in what could be done, but to do it in secret the way the Bush administration did it is an overt admission that the people of the Bush administration knew they were being too extreme and did not want the public to know what they were authorizing.

Let's say that again. President Bush explicitly and in secret declared that the use of torture would be the policy of the American government! He took this action in secret even as he told the American public that he had disavowed the use of torture by the U.S. government. The Republicans in Congress support this, and in the Senate they are doing everything they can to prevent Congressional oversight.

One thing to keep in mind. The Bush administration and the Republican Party took made these torture decisions in secret and hidden behind lies for fear of how the American public would react. That means that the decision to conduct these torture techniques, much like the peremptory invasion of Iraq based on lies, is the responsibility of the Republican Party. When actions are taken by criminals without the knowledge of the American public, it is not conducted by America. It is conducted by those lying Republicans and they are wholly responsible for such decisions and actions.

Bush and the Republican Party represent a cancer on the body politic of America. They are criminals, not politicians. They must at a minimum be removed from government.

Plans for war with Iran well-advanced

Raw Story provides excerpts on a report drawn up to document U.S. war plans. Here is a summary of how it will be done:

Plesch and Butcher examine "what the military option might involve if it were picked up off the table and put into action" and conclude that based on open source analysis and their own assessments, the US has prepared its military for a "massive" attack against Iran, requiring little contingency planning and without a ground invasion.

The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran’s WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order. The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.

• Any attack is likely to be on a massive multi-front scale but avoiding a ground invasion. Attacks focused on WMD facilities would leave Iran too many retaliatory options, leave President Bush open to the charge of using too little force and leave the regime intact.
• US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours.
• US ground, air and marine forces already in the Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan can devastate Iranian forces, the regime and the state at short notice.
• Some form of low level US and possibly UK military action as well as armed popular resistance appear underway inside the Iranian provinces or ethnic areas of the Azeri, Balujistan, Kurdistan and Khuzestan. Iran was unable to prevent sabotage of its offshore-to-shore crude oil pipelines in 2005.


• Nuclear weapons are ready, but most unlikely, to be used by the US, the UK and Israel. The human, political and environmental effects would be devastating, while their military value is limited.
• Israel is determined to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons yet has the conventional military capability only to wound Iran’s WMD programmes.
• The attitude of the UK is uncertain, with the Brown government and public opinion opposed psychologically to more war, yet, were Brown to support an attack he would probably carry a vote in Parliament. The UK is adamant that Iran must not acquire the bomb.
• The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.

When asked why the paper seems to indicate a certainty of Iranian WMD, Plesch made clear that "our paper is not, repeat not, about what Iran actually has or not." Yet, he added that "Iran certainly has missiles and probably some chemical capability."

Most significantly, Plesch and Butcher dispute conventional wisdom that any US attack on Iran would be confined to its nuclear sites. Instead, they foresee a "full-spectrum approach," designed to either instigate an overthrow of the government or reduce Iran to the status of "a weak or failed state." Although they acknowledge potential risks and impediments that might deter the Bush administration from carrying out such a massive attack, they also emphasize that the administration's National Security Strategy includes as a major goal the elimination of Iran as a regional power. They suggest, therefore, that:

This wider form of air attack would be the most likely to delay the Iranian nuclear program for a sufficiently long period of time to meet the administration’s current counterproliferation goals. It would also be consistent with the possible goal of employing military action is to overthrow the current Iranian government, since it would severely degrade the capability of the Iranian military (in particular revolutionary guards units and other ultra-loyalists) to keep armed opposition and separatist movements under control. It would also achieve the US objective of neutralizing Iran as a power in the region for many years to come.

However, it is the option that contains the greatest risk of increased global tension and hatred of the United States. The US would have few, if any allies for such a mission beyond Israel (and possibly the UK). Once undertaken, the imperatives for success would be enormous.

Butcher says he does not believe the US would use nuclear weapons, with some exceptions.

"My opinion is that [nuclear weapons] wouldn't be used unless there was definite evidence that Iran has them too or is about to acquire them in a matter of days/weeks," notes Butcher. "However, the Natanz facility has been so hardened that to destroy it MAY require nuclear weapons, and once an attack had started it may simply be a matter of following military logic and doctrine to full extent, which would call for the use of nukes if all other means failed."

The study excerpted here is from the paper

"Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East" – written by well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament

The recent increase in propaganda designed to justify the war against Iran is especially noticeable from the News Corp publications and particularly FOX News.

As for when the Bushies will pull the trigger on the attack, my bet is that they are watching the polls. The poll results are being looked at two ways.

The first focus of the "Attack Iran" propaganda effort being coordinated out of the White House is to see how much general approval they can get, especially among independent voters. They will pull the trigger as soon as they think the American electorate generally will support them, unless it means too many Republicans are likely to lose in the 2008 election as a result. The second focus is the 2008 election and how the attack on Iran will effect the Republican Party effort to regain control of the House and Senate in 2008.

Enough push back from people who recognize that this is an unnecessary war will delay it until November 2008. After that the White House has the rest of November, all of December and most of January to attack Iran. They will do it.

Why? Simple. They have no positive legacy anyway. But the hardliners are certain that Iran is an existential threat to the U.S. An attack on Iran would stop or severely delay any threat Iran poses. They know that the Democrats will not conduct the attack on the flimsy evidence that exists to so frighten the hardliners. The domestic political cost in the 2008 election will remain too high for them to conduct the attack before that election, but nothing prevents them from acting afterwards.

It is my opinion that the Bush hardliners will take that last 12 weeks in the White House after the election to conduct a "Hail Mary" action. The attack on Iran will be seen as the last chance for a big gain. They really think it will very possibly create - at the last moment - the positive legacy for the Bush administration that has eluded them for eight years now.

Bush to defeat Jihadists by making them stronger

As I listened to the Diane Rhem Show this morning Dr. Phebe Marr, author of "A Modern History of Iraq" and an expert contributor to the report of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, James Kitfield, senior correspondent, "National Journal" magazine and Col. Gary Anderson, U.S. Marine Corps--Retired all strongly made the point about how difficult it will be to withdraw from Iraq. Col Anderson's point that as we withdraw we continually have fewer troops available in country with which to protect our troops. (Force Protection.)

Essentially, getting out will be a lot harder than getting our troops into Iraq was. But just because it will be very hard to get out does not itself justify staying there and fighting.

Every strategy for success in Iraq depends on the government of Iraq taking control of that country and making it work again at least as well as it did under Saddam before we invaded. All of the Washington-designed benchmarks that were not met involved the failure of the government to achieve any success at all, and there is no indication that they will suddenly turn that around. Instead they have decided to take the month of August off and not bother trying.

Add to that the fact that our military presence can do nothing to make their government effective.

Michael Abramowitz reports today on what the National Intelligence Estimate which was released yesterday tells us. It's not good.

The White House faced fresh political peril yesterday in the form of a new intelligence assessment that raised sharp questions about the success of its counterterrorism strategy and judgment in making Iraq the focus of that effort.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush has been able to deflect criticism of his counterterrorism policy by repeatedly noting the absence of any new domestic attacks and by citing the continuing threat that terrorists in Iraq pose to U.S. interests.

But this line of defense seemed to unravel a bit yesterday with the release of a new National Intelligence Estimate that concludes that al-Qaeda "has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability" by reestablishing a haven in Pakistan and reconstituting its top leadership. The report also notes that al-Qaeda has been able "to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks," by associating itself with an Iraqi subsidiary. [Snip]

Although only a portion of the instability in Iraq is attributed to al-Qaeda and the group had no substantial power base there before the U.S. invasion, Bush again cast the war as a battle against its members, whom his aides have described as key provocateurs there. [Snip]

But many Democrats questioned the administration's explanations, seizing on the key judgments of the new intelligence estimate as yet another reason to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq and changing the administration's mission of the past four years.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said the current situation in Iraq "has helped to energize" al-Qaeda. "Changing our strategy in Iraq and narrowing our military mission to countering al-Qaeda terrorism -- as a bipartisan majority in the Senate now favors -- would be the single greatest thing we could do to undermine al-Qaeda's ability to use Iraq as a recruiting and propaganda tool fueling the growth of regional terrorist groups," he said in a statement.

Al-Qaeda's participation in the Iraqi violence has figured particularly heavily in recent administration arguments for a continued U.S. troop presence there, because White House strategists regard it as a politically salable reason for staying and continuing to fight.

Some terrorism analysts say Bush has used inflated rhetoric to depict al-Qaeda in Iraq as part of the same group of extremists that attacked the United States on Sept. 11 -- noting that the group did not exist until after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. These analysts say Bush also has overlooked the contribution that U.S. actions have made to the growth of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has been described as kind of a franchise of the main al-Qaeda network headed by bin Laden.

Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA analyst who has been involved in previous intelligence estimates, said that the administration has correctly identified the danger posed by al-Qaeda in Iraq and that there are indeed links between the Iraq group and the larger international terrorist network. But he said the White House is drawing the wrong conclusion, and argued instead that it is the U.S. presence in Iraq that is fueling the terrorists' cause.

"Iraq matters because it has become a cause celebre and because groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda central exploit the image of the United States being out to occupy Muslim lands," Pillar said.

Referring to al-Qaeda in Iraq, Clinton administration official Daniel S. Benjamin, who has written books and articles on international terrorism, said: "These are bad guys. These are jihadists." He added: "That doesn't mean we [should] stay in Iraq the way we have been, because we are not making the situation any better. We're creating terrorists in Iraq, we are creating terrorists outside of Iraq who are inspired by what's going on in Iraq. . . . The longer we stay, the more terrorists we create."

So what the Intelligence experts are pointing out is that we created the insurgency in Iraq which we are now fighting, and that our presence there, far from protecting us from Jihadists, is in fact increasing their power and number world wide.

To paraphrase Molly Ivins, we are deep inside a nasty hole in the ground from which we have to escape, yet we are trying to dig down to find a way out. That is what is known as a counter-productive strategy. You don't win a fight by making your enemy stronger. But that is exactly what we are doing.

As Diane Rhem's guests made so clear, getting out of Iraq will be very difficult. But as the new NIE points out, our presence in Iraq is contributing to our ultimate defeat there, while offering no possibility of actually winning.

We should be working to defeat the Jihadists, not to strengthen them. It really is time for us to go.

Bush strategy: Deliver fancy rhetoric, no facts and ignore critics

Don't listen to a Bush press conference for facts and reality. All you are going to get is the latest "focus-group tested" catch phrase and a bunch of irrelevant bullshit surrounding raw statements that translate into "I have decided on War. We will have war as long as I am in office." Usually this latter will be delivered in a whiny voice that says "Why don't you idiots out there understand what I see so clearly?"

Of course, what we almost almost all now understand now is that the "special clothes" he claims he is wearing don't exist. It is Bush who doesn't understand, and exposes his stupidity at every over-scripted press conference.

The political differences in bush's audience are not between those who understand how naked Bush is and those who are afraid to say they don't see his "clothes" for fear that everyone will recognize how stupid they are. As Steve Clemons points out, there are still 'true believers' among the right-wing, but they are being manipulated by the leaders like Bill Krystol. They are the targets of those "focus-group tested" catch phrases. But these are right-wing sheep wearing approved right-wing blinders.

The really important difference is between those who see the severe costs that America is paying for Bush's idiocy, and those right-wing leaders who will personally lose power and money when someone finally gets rid of Bush. That is why Bill Krystol is so proud of planting a new catch-phrase into Bush's Press Conference, and why he recently published the utterly reality-free pollyannaish article "Why bush will be a winner."

So bush, because of his mental illness, refuses to actually think about what government is doing. Instead he depends on his gut feel and his famous "Intuition." Then he turns the actually job of getting things done over to a few trusted subordinates - who are trusted largely because they don't ever disagree with Bush. Since Bush does not know how his subordinates operate, he cannot hold them accountable. Besides, he trusts them because of his intuition.

Those subordinates and their friends outside the government then manipulate Bush's decisions so that he thinks that he is making them. They keep critics away from Bush or discredit them to him, and they hand him the focus-grouped catch-phrases to manipulate the right-wing followers.

The result is a government that does not and cannot work, a lot of wealthy lobbyists and contractors getting paid for government contracts that they generally are not competent to perform, and a refusal to even question the continuance of the purposeless war in Iraq.

For the reason why the war cannot be ended, see The Iraq War IS the Republican Party. The term "Purposeless" refers to the American need for the War in Iraq. The Republican Party badly needs that war to continue.

As long as Bush remains President and the Republicans remain able to filibuster all significant legislation in the Senate, this will not change.

Bush has lost the war.

It is now completely clear that Bush has lost the war. Not his voluntary diversion into Iraq, the idiocy that was supposed to somehow remake the middle east. No, bush has completely lost the war on Terrorism. From the Associated Press by way of Yahoo News we get the most recent report on the real enemy of America (other then the conservatives, racists and religious extremists who make up today's Republican Party.) The real enemy? Al Qaeda.

WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded al-Qaida has rebuilt its operating capability to a level not seen since just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, The Associated Press has learned. The conclusion suggests that the group that launched the most devastating terror attack on the United States has been able to regroup along the Afghan-Pakistani border despite nearly six years of bombings, war and other tactics aimed at crippling it. [Snip]

Counterterrorism analysts produced the document, titled "Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West." The document focuses on the terror group's safe haven in Pakistan and makes a range of observations about the threat posed to the United States and its allies, officials said.

Al-Qaida is "considerably operationally stronger than a year ago" and has "regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001," the official said, paraphrasing the report's conclusions. "They are showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States."

The group also has created "the most robust training program since 2001, with an interest in using European operatives," the official quoted the report as saying.

At the same time, this official said, the report speaks of "significant gaps in intelligence" so U.S. authorities may be ignorant of potential or planned attacks.

John Kringen, who heads the CIA's analysis directorate, echoed the concerns about al-Qaida's resurgence during testimony and conversations with reporters at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.

"They seem to be fairly well settled into the safe haven and the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan," Kringen testified. "We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications. We see that activity rising."

So while Bush has been spending American tax money money like he was the spendthrift alcoholic son of an extremely wealthy father and telling American service people to lay down their lives in the great side-track of Iraq, al Qaeda has been quietly rebuilding all it lost from the invasion into Afghanistan and becoming an even greater threat to America.

Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld carefully allowed bin Laden to escape when he was surrounded at the complex at Tora Bora. For this great service, Gen. Tommy Franks was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The misbegotten war in Iraq has since drained American resources from Afghanistan where they could have been applied directly to al Qaeda, while creating a diversion in Iraq that has attracted Jihadists from all over the Arab world to attack Americans. Iraq has also created the greatest motivator for Jihadists to join al Qaeda that that organization has ever had, while attracting otherwise unrelated terrorist groups to use the name al Qaeda in order to build up their own reputation and recruiting power.

The result has been sharply reduced resources available to actually fight al Qaeda troops, allowing them to grow more powerful based largely on their reputation for being able to "stick it to the Americans" in Iraq.

There has never been a better example of utter incompetence in the Presidential Office than George W. Bush. Nearly six years now he has supposedly fought against al Qaeda, with the result that al Qaeda is at least as powerful now as they were six years ago on 9/11.

Consider this for an example of extreme incompetence in action. The so-called war on terror couldn't have gone much worse for America if Bush had simply continued to ignore terrorism after 9/11 as he did before that date.

Who gave Gaza to Hamas? Bush, Cheney and the NeoCons are largely at fault.

One of the most significant events in the Palestine/Israel situation has just occurred. The results of the election which the Palestinian government of Fatah was forced into have come to fruit. Fatah has been kicked out of Gaza and the extremist Islamic Iranian-backed Hamas has taken over. As M. J. Rosenberg describes the situation:

Gaza has fallen to Hamas. Abu Mazen's Fatah is on the run. Unless a United Nations force (like UNIFIL) steps in, a sliver of territory with a population of 1.4 million, a short drive from Tel Aviv will become a dagger aimed at Israel's heart and perhaps even an Al Qaeda staging ground. A humanitarian crisis of horrific proportions is a certainty.

Yep. No one needs to negotiate with the Islamists or their Iranian and Syrian backers, and the Palestinians are their own worst enemies, so just fence then away and every time one of them gets out of like and bombs those he considers the oppressors, just oppress them harder. Then just ignore the nasty beggars. They'll go away. Don't believe that? Continue reading Rosenberg's excellent analysis of what happened. Here is a key point he makes:

...it is not difficult understanding how Hamas won the legislative elections in 2006. This is another ugly part of the story. First we demanded that the Palestinians hold elections (Abbas didn’t want them), then we dispatched monitors to certify sure they were “free and fair” which they were, but when we didn’t like the election results we rejected them and promised that the Palestinians would “pay.” Almost immediately Members of Congress rushed to stop almost all forms of aid not just to Hamas-run institutions but to the Palestinian people at large.

There was another way we might have gone. We could have welcomed Hamas’s participation in the election as a sign that Hamas was implicitly accepting the Oslo framework (which it was), insisted on the complete cessation of violence, and then used carrots and sticks to encourage the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority to mend its ways. But we offered no carrots, just sticks. And we didn’t even make much of an effort to strengthen Hamas’s arch-enemy, President Mahmoud Abbas, with Congress hastening to impose redundant and insulting conditions even on aid that was to be sent through him.

It was all fun and games, politics as usual. Meanwhile, Hamas looked better and better to a people whose salaries were not being paid, thanks to the US sponsored international boycott of the PA, and whose schools and hospitals were collapsing.

Today it is almost amusing to contemplate the professions of horror on the part of right-wing Israelis (and their neocon friends) who scream “bloody murder” about an outcome they helped effect and actually welcome.

The name of their game was, is, and always will be making sure that Israel has “no partner” with whom to negotiate. Their worst fear is of Palestinians like Mahmoud Abbas who is a credible negotiating partner.

Sure has worked well, hasn't it? I'm sure that the NeoCons and Dick Cheney are delighted, while I wonder if anyone has bothered to mention the bad news to Bush. Bush gets testy with underlings who dare give him bad news, and it's really not like Bush has a clue regarding what to do. Does he dare create an Israel - Palestinian Czar to turn it over to as he has just done the Iraq - Afghanistan twin disasters with "Czar" Lute? Might not be all that bad an idea, but how much of the Presidency can Bush offload onto other people because he can't figure out what to do? At some point it becomes logical to simply bring in a real President who is up to the job himself.

But anyway, the question is still on the table? Who lost Gaza? Whose fault is THIS disaster?

The Palestinians, of course. But hardly theirs alone. As Nahum Barnea, Israel's finest journalist, put it today in Yediot Achronoth, "The US and Israel had a decisive contribution to this failure. The Americans, in their lack of understanding for the processes of Islamization in the territories, pressured to hold democratic elections and brought Hamas to power with their own hands…. Since the elections, Israel, like the US, declared over and over that "Abu Mazen must be strengthened," but in practice, zero was done for this to happen. The meetings with him turned into an Israeli political tool, and Olmert's kisses and backslapping turned Abu Mazen into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the Palestinian street."

The failures to which Barnea refers didn't start with the Palestinian elections either, not by a long shot. Back when Hamas was just a gleam in Sheik Ahmad Yassin’s blind eye, Israeli right-ringers were implementing a strategy to eliminate the authority of Palestinian moderates by building up religious extremists. These Israelis (some very high in Likud governments) believed that only supplanting Arafat’s Fatah with Islamic fundamentalists would prevent a situation under which Israel would be forced to negotiate with moderates.

M. J. Rosenberg continues with his excellent analysis, which you should go read.

Remember that time seven years ago when then-President Bill Clinton was able to get the Israelis and Fatah to sit down together and nearly agree to settle the Israeli - Palestinian problem? It was torpedoed by one man, Yassir Arafat. With a solution that close, Arafat could have been dealt with but it was time for Bush to take over the Presidency.

Bush and the NeoCons wanted much grander solutions, which included invading Iraq and setting up a demonstration state that showed how free elections (the form is what democracy is all about, isn't that so? Rule of Law? Traditions? Unimportant!) and a free-market small-government economy could bring the Muslims out of the Dark Ages and into the Modern World.

So the Bush administration dropped the ball on things that Clinton considered important and workable, like resolving the Israeli - Palestinian conflict and preparing to prevent terrorist incidents, and instead embarked on what is now clearly known to be the most disastrous series of foreign policy blunders in all of America's history. So we got 9/11, the occupation of Iraq, and now the total collapse of rational Palestinian government. Oh, yeah. We also got an expensive and still non-working white elephant called the Missile Defense System.

When you combine the idiocies of conservative free-market ideology with the ignorance of and refusal to learn about the cultures you intend to transform, then you ignore the experience of the Generals who tell you how things work while you go off headlong into an unneeded and unwinnable war, and give this entire witches-brew over to the tender mercies of the extremist wings of the Republican Party to finance and steal money from, the makings of the current disasters in American domestic policies, economic, taxation and the almost entirely Bush-made disaster that has overtaken the Middle East become clear. This mess that the Republicans have created will take generations to recover from, and historians will be looking back in horror for centuries.

It has been an educational period of time. After Nixon - Agnew - Kissinger I thought I understood how bad the Republican Party could be if placed in power. This administration has shown me that my imagination just couldn't reach the depths of depravity and ignorance the Republicans have gone to in reality. And just think. A lot of us have been permitted to watch the Republican train-wreck unfold, live and in color.

I think I would have preferred to go to Cleveland, thank you. Or gone to see a slasher movie that I could have walked out on.

Be VERY suspicious of all stories saying the Iranians are unified and out to get us.

Edward Luttwak provides a good description of how bad the information the American public has regarding the make up of the Iranian nation. Here is a sample of what he says:

As for the claim that the "Iranians" are united in patriotic support for the nuclear programme, no such nationality even exists. Out of Iran's population of 70m or so, 51 per cent are ethnically Persian, 24 per cent are Turks ("Azeris" is the regime's term), with other minorities comprising the remaining quarter. Many of Iran's 16-17m Turks are in revolt against Persian cultural imperialism; its 5-6m Kurds have started a serious insurgency; the Arab minority detonates bombs in Ahvaz; and Baluch tribesmen attack gendarmes and revolutionary guards. If some 40 per cent of the British population were engaged in separatist struggles of varying intensity, nobody would claim that it was firmly united around the London government. On top of this, many of the Persian majority oppose the theocratic regime, either because they have become post-Islamic in reaction to its many prohibitions, or because they are Sufis, whom the regime now persecutes almost as much as the small Baha'i minority. So let us have no more reports from Tehran stressing the country's national unity. Persian nationalism is a minority position in a country where half the population is not even Persian. In our times, multinational states either decentralise or break up more or less violently; Iran is not decentralising, so its future seems highly predictable, while in the present not much cohesion under attack is to be expected. [Highlighting mine - Editor PPS.]

Edward N. Luttwak has been in the business of studying military and political strategy for over forty years that I know of, and while I have disagreed with some of his conclusions, he has always worked from verifiable facts as far as I have seen. If he ever disagrees with anyone on TV, especially FOX, Luttwak will be correct.

Go read the entire article. It's worth it.

Then ask yourself if we are being given accurate information from the Bush administration or from the main stream media? Do we in the public know enough to feel threatened by Iran? (If you come to any answer other than a resounding "NO", go back and review it again. Because the real threat has to come well before we attack that country. Trusting Bush we made that mistake in 2003. That damned sure hasn't turned out as expected, nor has it turned out well.

We are being fed the same lines of bullshit about Iran by Cheney, Bush and company. If there is a sane rationale for the military action we are being pushed towards then is is nowhere in evidence.

Here is what is wrong with the NSA domestic spying program

Kevin Drum provides the best description I have yet seen of the core reason why we should be shocked at the story of Gonzales trying to coerce then AG Ashcroft to reapprove the NSA domestic spying program even when he was zonked out in intensive care.

We still don't know what the program is or more important, what it was.

How much longer in Iraq before we win(?) lose(?) withdraw(?) change strategy(?)

Today Atrios wrote this:

"It was six months ago today that General Abizaid said the following:

Pressed by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., on how much time the U.S. and Iraqi government have to reduce the violence in Baghdad before it spirals beyond control, Abizaid said, "Four to six months."

-Atrios 08:57"

How do you create an authoritarian state out of a democracy? Easy. Ten steps.

Naomi Wolf discusses what is required to take down a democracy and replace it with an authoritarian government in the Guardian.

If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration. [Snip]

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Let me provide just an overview of her excellent article:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy - "war footing"; a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation"; terrorists. (But terrorism is a technique of fighting, not an identifiable enemy.)


2. Create a gulag - Guantánamo Bay; The CIA's secret gulag. Prison camps in isolated locations for "illegal immigrants."


3. Develop a thug caste - Blackwater and other security firms deployed in New Orleans. Privately run and staffed prisons. The Republican thugs who shut down the vote recount in Miami in 2000.


4. Set up an internal surveillance system - The secret program to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions; Uncontrolled National Security Letters that include a total gag order on the people who have to turn over the documents, like librarians, booksellers, income tax preparers, etc.


5. Harass citizens' groups - Infiltrate and investigate organizations like Churches and Environmental organizations. IRS investigations to remove tax exempt status of churches that oppose Bush while giving funding to those churches that support Bush.


6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release - The ways to get on the No-Fly list are completely arbitrary, while there are no known ways to get off. Any citizen or other person in the U.S. can be arrested, declared an “enemy combatant” and refused all access to an attorney, the courts, or habeas corpus. The federal government is not even required to tell people who inquire if you have been detains, or if so, where. This is outside the law, by definition it is arbitrary at the whim of the individual who decided to detain you.


7. Target key individuals - The U.S. Attorneys fired in the Pearl Harbor Day Massacre are an example.


8. Control the press - See Moyers delivers the goods. The Washington Press corps should wear hoods and sunglasses and Glenn Greenwald dissects the Bill Moyers PBS report.


9. Dissent equals treason - "Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage". Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor"." [*]
   
   Just listen to Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and the commenters on Little Green Footballs.


10. Suspend the rule of law - "The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens." [*]

[*] Quote from Naomi Wolf

This process of creating an authoritarian state is not a new one. It hasn't been done here in the U.S. before, but we are further down the process than we have ever been before.

The really scary part if that people just don't want to hear or to believe this is possible.

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And don't bug me about the difference between an authoritarian government and "Fascism," the term used by the headline writer in the Guardian. There is no distinction that matters. None at all.

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Addendum 8:37PM
Consider the above post with the summary of techniques listed above with those Bill Moyers illuminated last night in his PBS show last night and which are summarized at FireDogLake. A lot of overlap there. Why did Bush and the NeoCons really want to attack Iraq?

Sec. Def. Gates - resignation of Sadr's ministers may advance peace

The six Ministers in the Iraqi government who come from Muktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Militia resigned recently. Today the Washington Post has an article on what Secretary of Defense Bob Gates has to say about the resignations.

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer

AMMAN, Jordan, April 17 -- The decision by anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to withdraw ministers loyal to him from the Iraqi cabinet could advance political reconciliation if the vacancies are used to broaden the government's representation, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Tuesday.

Gates, on a Middle East tour, called for a range of efforts from inside and outside Iraq to speed up the formation of a broad-based government of Iraq's majority Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions.

Toward that end, Gates said demands in the U.S. Congress for a timeline to withdraw American troops from Iraq are constructive because they exert pressure on Iraq's leaders to forge compromises.

"The debate in Congress . . . has been helpful in demonstrating to the Iraqis that American patience is limited," Gates told Pentagon reporters traveling with him in Jordan. "The strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably has had a positive impact . . . in terms of communicating to the Iraqis that this is not an open-ended commitment."

Sounds like Bob Gates is off the reservation with Bush - and more important, with Cheney.

So what are they going to do? Bush can't fire the guy he just hired to replace the clearly incompetent Don Rumsfeld. Not after he went, hat in hand, to Texas A&M to ask Gates to give up his dream job as President of the University to come save the Department of Defense and the War in Iraq. There would never be an adequate replacement willing to step into the job after that. Gates is really rather free to do as he wishes.

This Freedom from control that Gates has may be why the White House was searching for a War Czar. The rebuffs by the three most likely holders of that position suggest that the White House can't structure around the Secretary of Defense to get what they want. No one who is qualified is willing to become the White House cats' paw to circumvent the Secretary of Defense.

Now we see that Bob Gates feels free enough to say things that don't fit the White House message, so it looks like he knows that the White House can't realistically remove him. It looks to me (as an outsider) as though Bush has lost a lot of the control of how the war in Iraq will be managed.

That won't stop Cheney from being able to sabotage initiatives Bob Gates attempts, but even that may be weakened. Dick Cheney's power to sabotage actions he considers insufficiently hawkish comes from the time when he was in charge of appointing the Executive Department political appointees (See the Plum Book.) That was a job Cheney asked for and was given when Bush first became President. Cheney then arranged for his acolytes to be appointed to a variety of policy positions in every important cabinet department. It has been this network of Cheney acolytes throughout the government which has allowed him to sabotage a number of more moderate initiatives for the last six years. One example is John Bolton who frustrated Colin Powell almost completely the first Bush term. Bolton probably delayed the reduction of tensions with Libya and Qaddafi by at least a year, and may have contributed to the high level of tensions with both North Korea and Iran.

Some of the Cheney acolytes have moved on, but some have also moved up. This network is Cheney's second most significant source of power in the Executive Department, right after his relationship with Bush. But the loss of Don Rumsfeld at Secretary of Defense will have weakened Cheney significantly. The freedom that Rumsfeld's replacement, Bob Gates, demonstrates in making this public statement suggests that change towards a more realistic policy is a bit more possible now.

We need to watch for additional statements and personnel changes out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense that suggest that Gates might be taking control of American actions in Iraq and might actually get something accomplished in spite of Bush and Cheney.

The news of the extension of combat tours to 15 months was leaked early

It appears that because of a leak, Bob Gates was forced to acknowledge that the plan to extend combat tours from 12 months to 15 had already been made, but the announcement was supposed to be later. So what did the leak mean?

According to Atrios the news of the tour extension was supposed to be announced AFTER Bush vetoed the Democratic Congress' supplemental bill to pay the costs of the war which Bush refuses to properly budget. Then Bush was going to blame the Democrats for the extension of tours.

That's the best explanation I have seen, and I don't doubt it for a second. It is pure "Rove" - totally slimy politics.

Greenwald provides a list of "missing" document cases.

Glenn Greenwald has a really interesting article today in Salon. He goes back and reviews a number of cases in which somehow the Bush administration has "lost" documents that law and the courts required them to turn over.

Go sit through the (short) Salon Day Pass and read the article. Then go back and review:

• More on the RNC non-government email system
  (April 12, 2007) posted today.

If you miss the reference, then go back even further to my earlier post:

• Surprise. The emails sent through the RNC have 'accidentally' been lost.
  April 11, 2007

More on the RNC non-government email system

It is clear that the email system provided to 22 current top White House aides was intended to provide a method of doing political work that the Hatch Act states cannot be done on government equipment. But it is also a lot more. It has primarily been an email system designed to be used that was not open to audit or subpoena in lawsuits. Here is what Paul Kiel wrote at TPM Muckraker today on the subject:

it's apparent from emails that the White House avoided the governmental email system because it was vulnerable to investigators. The Hatch Act just provided a good excuse. In 2003, for instance, a lobbyist for Jack Abramoff Kevin Ring wrote him that emails about Abramoff's clients shouldn't be sent to White House addresses because "it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc." That warning, Ring told The Washington Post, came from Jennifer Farley, a deputy in the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Susan Ralston, Rove's personal aide, used RNC provided email accounts when corresponding with Abramoff, her old boss.

And remember that Karl Rove reportedly uses his RNC-provided account for approximately 95% of his communication.

In other words, it was an open secret at the White House that the parallel system was to be used for everything you didn't want coming out later -- an understanding that was most likely never made explicit, but a situation that was carefully preserved by not providing apparently any parameters for what sort of communication should be done via the White House system.

The apparent loss of a large number of emails was not an accident. It was the reason the system was used as extensively as it was, especially by Karl Rove, and the reason why clear guidance on how to use the system properly was never made explicit.

This was political. In spite of all the incompetence the Bush administration has displayed in other arenas of government, the one thing they do well is political activities and planning. The lack of clear guidance for using the RNC email system was not accidental. The misuse of the system was not accidental. And most especially, the reported loss of many emails has not been accidental.

This was political, planned and conducted by highly experienced political operators with specific political goals in mind. Anything they tell us to the contrary should be assumed to be a lie - a lie that was planned from the beginning as a cover for the system itself.

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Addendum 10:52 AM CDT
Atrios says it so much better than I do.

Voter Suppression

It's probably a hopeless task, but perhaps someone other than dirty fucking hippie bloggers can understand that Karl Rove's efforts to use the tools of the state to suppress the votes of poor and minority voters is, you know, profoundly wrong in a way which makes him a extremely bad man.

Why the media failed in the run-up to the war in Iraq

The major American media institutions bought into the lies and deceptions that the White House was peddling to take America to war in Iraq in 2003. Then they spread those lies and deceptions far, wide and deep so that any effort to question them became something only a fool or a traitor to America would try.

The result was the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld preemptive(?) invasion of Iraq leading to the quagmire that we are now told we cannot leave, because leaving Iraq means that America has lost the war there. For personal reasons of their own, admitting that the war is lost is anathema to George W. Bush and John McCain. Those personal reasons are never stated. They are cloaked in patriotism with the idea that "America" cannot lose the war in Iraq.

We also know that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, that he considered bin Laden and al Qaeda his enemies, and that he had no nuclear weapons program, chemical weapons program or biological weapons program in active or potentially active status. The UN inspection teams had it right in their reports.

Once those lies were recognized generally there have developed several new reasons for why we invaded Iraq and remain there.

• First is that we had to remove a nasty dictator. Saddam was bad, but Mugabe in Zambia is worse, as are the leaders of Sudan who are conducting genocide on the natives of Darfur - but we don't have carrier groups off either coast nor do we have troops on the ground sending back a steady stream of bodybags from either of those countries.
  
• Then there is the idea that we should be there to bring democracy to Iraq. Besides being highly paternalistic, it is something now universally recognized by thinking people that we cannot do that with armed troops. Our very presence caused too much animosity, for one thing. For another, the sectarian strife we unleashed and with the help of al Qaeda sharply increased has made democracy a dream unlikely to be achieved until far in the future if at all. Certainly it will not happen while we have troops in Iraq.
  
• Another reason now given is that if we leave abruptly things will obviously get much worse rapidly. No one bothers to explain how or why they will get worse, but somehow the conditions now must not be as bad as it can get. Again, this his a highly paternalistic view of the Iraqi people. Somehow they won't be able to sort out governing themselves unless we have our Army and Marine Corps on hand to protect their politicians. Clearly they can't make the Iraqi government we foisted on them work. How can they create one of their own? They're just Arab Wogs, right? [The insult, WOGs, apparently is an acronym developed by the British army when they were attempting the idiotic occupation Iraq after WW I. It supposedly stands for "Old Wiley Gentlemen." Looked at that way, is seems more of a compliment than an insult.]
• The other reason for not getting our troops out of Iraq seems to be that Dick Cheney and the NeoCons think that if we admit that we have already lost the occupation we will appear weak to our enemies, such as Iran and North Korea. This is what I wrote on the subject last May 30th:

  This pessimistic view is one that leaves the U.S. in a real bind. As we remain in Iraq we are being bled like a Bull in a bullfight by the picadors before the main bull fight begins. There appears no way to actually change things there in a manner that would result in real peace. But if we leave, our pullout will set off the attempted genocide of the Sunnis by the Shiites, followed by the entry of Sunni Arabs from Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc.
  
  Bush seems to have decided that Iraq can establish a national government that will be able to pacify the situation. The five months it has taken to establish a government after the last election and the fact that no decision has been made on the security positions in that government, plus the fact that the government has no real power outside the Greed Zone of Baghdad makes that an unlikely long shot.
  
  Does the term "No win situation" occur to anyone besides me?

  Nothing has changed since then except to get worse.

So now for these weak reasons our purpose in keeping our nearly depleted Army and Marine troops in Iraq has been reduced to fear of admitting that we have lost the war there, and maybe that we are afraid the Iraqis have to have use there to shoot at so they won't focus even more on each other.

How did we get to this point? The incompetence of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld has been widely discussed in great detail. The failures of the major media have been decried, but with a lot less specificity. Until now. Now Gary Kamiya has written an excellent indictment of the media and published it in Salon. [Sit through the Day-Pass. It is short, and the article is worth the trouble!]

Then follow that up by reading Glenn Greenwald's discussion of the really bad lies that ABC News told America - repeatedly - about the Anthrax attacks on Americans and the (nonexistent) connection to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. This is the second of his discussions. It includes ABC's defense of its' indefensible actions in misdirecting the American public.

Bush to congress: "My way or the Highway."

People in the Washington media keep saying that the Democrats are making a mistake by being too extreme in demanding to set a timetable for getting the troops out of Iraq, but that is what the Democrats were elected to do. Putting into law a specific date to get the troops out of Iraq is a very blunt-force effort, and far from the ideal way of determining how to end the war in Iraq in the manner that is best for both the nation and people of Iraq as well as what is best for America. But to get that ideal solution requires that Bush be willing to work with Congress to get us out of Iraq.

That was what the Baker - Hamilton Report last fall was supposed to accomplish. It set up conditions that would allow Bush a face-saving way to compromise with the incoming Congress and do what the American public (and much of the Iraqi public for which thousands demonstrated yesterday) wants done. The result? Bush threw the report back into Baker and Hamilton's faces (figuratively speaking, of course.) and found a new commander who would escalate a losing war. [No intelligent military person will reinforce a losing position, but that is what the surge amounts to.]

The Washington media, represented today by David Ignatius on the Dianne Rhem Show on NPR and by David Broder states in today's OpEd, thinks that now is the time for a compromise between the Democratic Leaders of Congress and the Bush White House. Broder specifically states "What ought to happen is clear. There ought to be direct talks between them -- with senior administration officials on one side of the table and leaders of the House and Senate on the other."

Well, Bush called Broder's bluff today. He called the Democratic Congressional Leaders to come over to the White House to tell them to support his decisions. Think he plans to compromise any? Here's White House spokesperson Dana Perino today.



What do you think? Is Bush likely to even discuss the situation, let alone compromise with the Democrats? She is throwing down the gauntlet if I ever saw anyone do it, and she is thoroughly enjoying telling the press, the Democrats and the public where to go.

When the surge fails, Bush is going to attempt something else and demand another six to nine months for it to fail. The goal for Bush is no longer to win in Iraq. It is to stay in Iraq until after January 2009 so that the Democrats will have to withdraw. That way the Republicans can play the political game of "Who lost Iraq?"

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Addendum April 11, 2007
Greg Sargent points out that the Democrats have several times asked Bush to sit down with them and discuss the funding bill on Iraq, to no avail. Copies of the letters are shown at the sit I have linked to. The replies cannot be linked to, since they don't exist.

But now that Bush wants to lecture the Democrats in public, he wants them to visit him in the White House. It's still a waste of time, because Bush refuses to negotiate.

Bush-league incompetence in war since 9/11

Just read this from Joe Galloway today:

Masters of the art of war

By Joseph Galloway
An ever more combative President Bush last week denounced the Democratic majority in the House and Senate for attempting to substitute its tactical and strategic judgment for that of our military commanders on the ground in Iraq.

Heaven forbid.

How dare Washington politicians attempt to dictate benchmarks for measuring the effectiveness of the ineffective Iraqi government or lay down timelines for beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops from a war gone bad?

The president's indignation might resonate more loudly with the American people if it were not so heavily laden with hypocrisy.

Shall we call to mind that for six years Bush and his senior cohorts -- Vice President Dick Cheney and the unlamented former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- rode roughshod over the best advice of their military commanders?

Remember Afghanistan? Remember how we blew the best chance ever at destroying Osama bin Laden and the top leadership of al Qaeda because we didn't have enough American forces on the ground to seal off all the escape routes from Tora Bora?

Or how American troops were killed and wounded in Operation Anaconda because they didn't have artillery support when they so desperately needed it?

And why was this?

It was because Rumsfeld, that paragon of military expertise who (like his bosses) had never heard a shot fired in anger, had dictated that no more than 7,000 American troops would be permitted to set foot in Afghanistan and had ordered the Army to leave its artillery pieces behind.

How did Rumsfeld arrive at that arbitrary manpower ceiling of 7,000 pairs of boots on the ground and not one pair more? God only knows. He was determined to prove that high-tech weaponry had rendered obsolete old-fashioned ideas about how you seize and control an enemy's territory.

The Army would have no need of its artillery fire support. The Air Force, with its satellite-guided smart bombs and its AC-130 gunships, would provide all the fire support that the old-fashioned ground-pounders would ever need.

So when we finally tracked Osama and his merry band of murderous thugs to the cave stronghold of Tora Bora, our military commanders had no choice but to depend on three Afghan warlords to seal the escape routes into Pakistan. Instead, the warlords set up what amounted to toll booths and happily sold get-out-of-jail-free cards to Osama and Company.

When reconnaissance photos showed the escaping terrorists' campfires in the mountains, the warlords said they belonged to shepherds, who presumably were feeding snow to their sheep.

And while Army artillery is on call 24/7 to provide a shield of hot steel to their infantry brothers in snow, sleet or heavy mountain clouds, the Air Force still is loath to fly expensive jet fighters through zero-zero weather full of 12,000-foot granite peaks. It already had decreed that the highly effective AC-130 gunships with their Gatling guns and 105mm artillery pieces were too vulnerable to fly during daylight hours.

That's just Afghanistan. Then came Iraq.

Here Rumsfeld, with the obvious approval of Cheney and Bush, tampered and tinkered with literally everything. He threw out a war plan, which had been drawn up based on everything the generals had learned about war in that part of the world, that called for an invasion force of 450,000 American and allied troops. Rumsfeld determined that a figure of something like 100,000 would be more than enough and threw out five years of planning and war games.

When Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki reluctantly offered an opinion to a senator that it would require "several hundred thousand troops" to secure and occupy Iraq, Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz hurried to Capitol Hill to dismiss that estimate as "outlandish." After all, Wolfowitz said, we all know that Iraq has none of the ethnic divisions of a place like Afghanistan and thus would be easier to subdue.

So we invaded Iraq with half the troops we needed to occupy and pacify the country. When Baghdad fell, there was no plan and no troops to keep the mobs from looting government offices and destroying everything from power and sewage plants to hospitals and army camps and schools. No troops available to occupy and pacify the heart of Saddam Hussein's power base among the Sunnis of the Anbar province. No troops to secure the vast ammunition dumps or secure the borders.

Rumsfeld and his bosses forbade the generals to plan for a long occupation or nation-building. Why plan for those things when we'd be leaving Iraq within six months, by the summer of 2003? Nation-building and the creation of a new government were not our job, they said. Instead, we'd just turn Iraq over to the Pentagon's good friend Ahmad Chalabi and his fellow Iraqi exiles.

We now know how well Bush has commanded the military; how accurate his and Cheney's and Rumsfeld's predictions were and what masters they were of the art of war. Mission Accomplished. Last throes. A few dead-enders. A little untidiness.

Now Bush would have us believe that he always listens to his military commanders, that he's outraged that a mere majority of both houses of Congress would presume to substitute their judgment for his ... er, his commanders.

After all, he's not merely the commander in chief; he's The Decider.

Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. He is also co-author of the book "We were soldiers once...and young." from which the excellent movie "We were Soldiers" was made.

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[I have copied this editorial under the exception to the copyright law for purposes of discussion - editor.]